Within any structure there must be those elements that are mainly interested in order, those elements that are mainly interested in chaos, and those elements that are in-between; that are at times interested in order and at other times interested in chaos.

This arrangement represents a universal balance of opposites. Both order and chaos are vital for the health of any structure, and an imbalance in favour of either can be classed as unhealthy and potentially life-threatening.

Order is characterised by the coming-together of separate elements.
We order the world by conceptualising what we experience, which is
another way of saying that we take separate and unrelated experiences
and create connections between them, creating a new unit from those
formerly separate elements.

Chaos is characterised
by a flow in the opposite direction, by the separation of enjoined
elements. Whenever we break something apart we
are moving towards chaos.

We can see an example of this arrangement in the structure of the atom: the electrons are interested in chaos, the protons in order, and the neutrons mediate between the two.

In this sense, those within a society who push towards individualism are swinging the pendulum towards chaos; and those who push towards collectivism are swinging it towards order.

Neither direction is inherently better than the other, rather they form a dialectic; which is another way of saying that they are always in conversation with one another. The health of the structure depends on this conversation, upon each side having a say.

When it comes to a society we call those who are mainly interested in
order 'authoritarians' (amongst other things) and those who are mainly
interested in chaos 'libertarians' (amongst other things). The authoritarian impulse is to move towards a single point of power. If we picture a pyramid, then the authoritarian favours the top, the capstone, and favours a movement up towards it. The libertarian impulse, on the other hand, is to move towards multiple points of power, which is a move down the pyramid towards the many blocks that form its lower layers.

In this sense the authoritarian impulse is synonymous with idealism, or abstraction. The idealist is also interested in the upward movement towards something singular and all-encompassing, and the ultimate aim of idealism is a concept that can encapsulate everything. Again, abstraction can be visualised as the journey up a pyramid, from the multiple concepts that form its bottom layers, to the all-seeing totality of the capstone. One of the drawbacks of idealism is that its process takes us further and further from 'reality,' from the raw data of the ground-level. The idealist is always in danger of losing touch with 'the real world,' in floating off into abstractions.

The libertarian impulse is synonymous with empiricism, a move towards raw non-conceptualised experience. The empiricist is interested in the move down the pyramid, preferring the specifics of parts to the generality of wholes. One of the drawbacks of empiricism is that as it moves ever closer to reality it loses the ability to make sense of that reality. The empiricist is always in danger of drowning in the chaos of experience.

The libertarian impulse has as its goal a state of anarchy in which there are no social norms, and is in this sense a hetrogenising influence, preferring diversity over similarity.

The authoritarian impulse has as its goal a strict all-inclusive ideology to which all must conform, and is in this sense a homogenising influence, preferring similarity over diversity.

I remember a long while back I read a paper on why human beings have two hemispheres […] roughly speaking, the left/linguistic hemisphere attempts to impose predictable structure on the world, simplifying it.

Its not exactly an ideological simplification, its more like a practical simplification, because the world is so complex that unless you chunk it into categories it overwhelms you. So you have to chunk it into categories. And those categories aren’t exactly descriptions of things or objects, they’re more like tools for operating in the world.

And then the right hemisphere keeps track of anomalies and exceptions, and tries to build those slowly into the category system so that it doesn’t blow the category system […]

There was an example of this that a researcher named Goldberg offered. He’d trained a neural network to recognise images of fish, and the same […] network to recognise images of birds. But when he showed it a Penguin it blew the category structure, so that all fish became birds and all birds became fish.

Now, the postmodernists like Derrida claim that category structures were primarily tools of power and oppression - which to me is an absurd claim, because that’s not their primary use, even though that may be one of their consequences, and one of their occasional uses. And he became very very concerned about who the category systems marginalised, and what the consequence was of that for them.

[…] Its a really fundamental problem, that categories exclude; but then of you include the excluded in the category then you blow the category structure […] this is partly why right-wing Christians were so opposed to homosexual marriage.

What’s happening very rapidly is, because the binary category has been violated you get an explosion of chaotic identities. So its gone from two, to […] three, to […] thirty one in New York, and seventy online; and then there’s this additional explosion which is being promoted by people, who aren’t concerned with the category of gender identity but with other categories like human vs non-human identity.[…] its a really interesting example of how binary categories maintain order, and if you violate them to include those who are excluded what you produce is an up-swelling of unmanageable chaos.

The situation of homosexually inclined males in Yucatan is much different from that of members of the urban gay subculture of the United States. Because homoeroticism is much more diffuse in the society, there are not separate subcultural institutions for homosexuals.

[…] We can question whether a separated gay subculture, a minority lifestyle built around sexual preferences, is more preferable to integration of gender variance and same-sex eroticism into the general family structure and the mainstream society. We can use the American Indian concept of spirituality to break out of the deviancy model, to reunite families, and to offer special benefits to society as a whole.

[...] authoritarianism is not a stable personality trait. It is rather a psychological predisposition to become intolerant when the person perceives a certain kind of threat.

It’s as though some people have a button on their foreheads, and when
the button is pushed, they suddenly become intensely focused on
defending their in-group, kicking out foreigners and non-conformists,
and stamping out dissent within the group. At those times they are more
attracted to strongmen and the use of force.

What pushes that button is a] “normative threat,” which basically means a threat to the integrity of
the moral order (as they perceive it). It is the perception that “we”
are coming apart [...]

"The experience or perception of disobedience to group authorities or
authorities unworthy of respect, nonconformity to group norms or norms
proving questionable, lack of consensus in group values and beliefs and,
in general, diversity and freedom ‘run amok’ should activate the
predisposition and increase the manifestation of these characteristic
attitudes and behaviors."

[...] authoritarians are not being selfish [...] They are trying to protect their group or society.

"[T]he increasing license allowed by [...] evolving cultures generates
the very conditions guaranteed to goad latent authoritarians to sudden
and intense, perhaps violent, and almost certainly unexpected,
expressions of intolerance."

[...] whenever a country has historically high levels of immigration, from
countries with very different moralities, and without a strong and
successful assimilationist program, it is virtually certain that there
will be an authoritarian counter-reaction, and you can expect many
status quo conservatives to support it.

"Ultimately, nothing inspires greater tolerance from the intolerant than
an abundance of common and unifying beliefs, practices, rituals,
institutions, and processes. And regrettably, nothing is more certain to
provoke increased expression of their latent predispositions than the
likes of “multicultural education,” bilingual policies, and
nonassimilation."

Many of my clients think that if they set any boundaries for their dogs, they automatically become the bad guy. That's certainly the problem John Grogan and Jenny Vogt had. Without discipline they could not accomplish respect. They could not give Marley the rules, boundaries and limitations he needed in order to live a more peaceful life. He ended up full of [...] instability.

By giving a dog rules, boundaries, and limitations, you don't "kill his spirit." You just give him the structure he needs in his life in order to find peace and allow his true dog self to emerge.

Pribram and McTaggart [...] contrast “entropy” (as the movement of the
inanimate world – which is towards chaos and disorder), with the
coherence of consciousness which creates order.

This view is to some extent supported by Braud’s examination of
interpersonal connection.

Braud (MacTaggart, 2003, p. 180) has indicated
that human interaction results in the synchronisation of brainwave
patterns, and that the person with the most cohesive pattern has the
greatest influence on the EEG patterns of others.

1 comment:

Could you reference the neural network study made by Goldberg? It sounds wrong to me that a neural network can suddently switch its categorization.. It shouldn't be possible to alter a neural networks categorization by simply evaluating if an image is a fish or a bird.